If you've used Krita before, you must be familiar with the cute little icons that represents Krita's many different brushes. These are the brush presets. And there's more than hundred of them. Every artist has their own needs, so it may be that one day you discover that the preinstalled presets are not enough.
Let's make some presets!
First things first, we need to find the brush-settings editor. The brush settings editor in Krita can be found in the toolbar, between the gradients, patterns and color widget on the left and the brush mode, eraser and alpha lock on the right. Or, more simple: Just press f5 to open the brush settings editor (incidentally, f6 opens the toolbar brush docker).
The brush settings editor has a lot of different parts.
The scratchpad has a little square in it, when you save the brush, the contents of the square are used to make the brush preset. If you press the brush icon below the scratchpad, the current preset icon is loaded into the square. The gradient icon fills the whole scratchpad with the currently active gradient, and the fill tool fills it with the current background color. The red stop symbol empties the scratchpad and make it white.
Warning |
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Krita's scratchpad is known to crash the program when you installed an new version of Krita on a computer that used to have an older version. To fix this issue, delete the 'kritarc' file in the %appdata%/roaming folder on windows, or the .kde/share/config folder on Linux. |
So, to demonstrate how to use this system, let's make a simple inking brush: A nice round brush that uses your tablet's sensors and makes pretty lines.
So that's how you create a basic inking brush. There's more options you can make use of, like for example:
If you want to share your brushes there's two ways to do that:
To do this, you first need to find the resources folder. This one is supossed to be in HOME/.kde/share/apps/krita/ on linux and user/appdata/roaming/krita on windows, but the easiest way to access it is by going to
This'll open your file browser with the right folder for your operating system.Now, Krita internally refers to it's brush-presets not as 'brushes' but as 'paintoppresets' which is short for 'paint operation presets'. So you are looking for a file in the 'paintops' folder. Krita saves it's presets as *.kpp files, which are png files with embedded meta-data contain the brush settings info.
If you saved over a previous file, you'll notice there's a lot of filenameGJDTXY.kpp or something like it in the folder. This is because Krita doesn't save over, but rather attaches a temporary name to the new preset. To find the proper preset, first go to
to get rid of all the clutter, and then select the file that sounds like the preset you are looking for. As it's a PNG, you should be able to recognize it's preview picture.To edit a *.kpp preview picture, drag-and-drop it into Krita, and
. You will now get an image of 200x200 pixels that you can edit to your desire.Save your file, and if it didn't have a predefined brush tip, you can just sent it to a friend.
They can import the .kpp by either clicking the folder icon in the toolbar brush preset dropdown(f6) and selecting the *.kpp from their files. Or by going to the resource manager ( ) and selecting 'import resources', which will also bring up a file-browser, that should be set to 'kpp' and used to look for the proper file.
This is an outdated method, and if you are using Krita 2.9 and up, it may even be that these brushes don't work properly.
Regardless, if you have been sent a zip, you need to copy over the files inside files to the resource folder, and restart Krita. More effective however is to use...
Resource bundles are also zip-files, but they contain a lot of extra-information, like creator, date, version of Krita, and they can be used by Krita to mass-install resources and also to mass-uninstall.
You can make a resource bundle by going to shift or ctrl, and then use the right button to add them to the selected list all at once. You can have multiple resource-types in a single bundle, just select a new resource type, and move the resources to the selected list.
and selecting , A new window will pop-up. To the left, you can fill in the meta-data, the icon, and where the bundle ought to be saved to. The bundle name will be used to tag it, and the rest will be used in the description. Select a resource type in the drop-down to the top-right, and then select the resources you want to use in the list. Press the button pointing to the right to put them in the selected list. You can select multiple items at once usingWhen you are done, press OK, and the bundle will be generated at the place where you told it to. That bundle can be shared.
To install a bundle, go to
and select and set the file-browser filter to 'resource bundle'. Navigate to where the bundle is, and click . The bundle is now installed, and it's contents have been tagged with the bundle name.You can deactivate a bundle by selecting it from the 'active' list, and pressing the 'right arrow' to the 'inactive' list. Reinstalling bundles can be done in a similar manner, by selecting them from the inactive list and pressing the 'left arrow' to move it to the active list.
Activating and deactivating bundles can help manage Krita's start-up time.
Deleting a brush preset in Krita blacklists it for future recovering, to delete it permanently you have to remove the file with a separate file manager see Resources.
There's many more brush-engine than what has been covered here, as are there brush engine options and sensors. You have the basics down now, but the following pages give more information on these subjects:
Brush Engines:
Overall Brush Settings: